Fritinancy

Crafting a Voice for RepairPal

For many of my clients I'm the namer-in-chief. For a few others I'm in charge of what's usually called "content"--I come up with ideas, do research and interviews, and write copy. For others I'm a ghostwriter of books or speeches. And for some clients I do something that falls somewhere in between: I create a vocabulary that becomes the client's verbal brand.

Verbal branding is what I did for RepairPal, the auto-maintenance site that launched last month. The site allows users to find and rate repair shops, get accurate and unbiased estimates for repairs, look up common repair problems and issues specific to their car's make and model, read about car parts and systems, and securely store repair records online.

My work for RepairPal began just before Christmas of 2007 with a proposal I submitted for "positioning the company, creating an effective and engaging corporate voice, bringing home and landing pages into focus, and establishing a verbal brand that can be extended into other parts of the website and other communications." This sort of work is hard to describe and (usually) even harder to sell. Fortunately, in RepairPal I had a smart and receptive client. CEO David Sturtz and his management team knew they needed an outsider's perspective to clarify, simplify, and "warmify" their content.¹ David's a self-professed car buff who knows a lot about how cars work; he took for granted many of the questions his less-sophisticated audience would have. He wanted a woman's perspective, too: for most of my six-month engagement, all of RepairPal's executives and technical advisers were men, but they expected most of the site's users to be women.

So my assignment was clear--and also vague. "Voice" and "tone" in writing are notoriously difficult to define. Here's what Jack Hitt says about them in a chapter titled "Voice" in his excellent book, A Writer's Coach:

Like a singer's, a writer's voice is an elusive thing, the sum of everything that goes into his or her style of written expression. A distinctive vocabulary might contribute to it. So might a preference for particular sentence forms or syntax. Or voice might emerge from even more subtle dimensions of writing. Unique angles of approach to subjects, maybe. Or a characteristic pace or degree of formality.

Later in the chapter, Hitt identifies some of the enemies of an authentic writing voice: pomposity, trendspeak, clichés (he provides a long list), private languages, and the "elegant variation" (a tortured effort to avoid repetition, as when a writer refers to Mickey Mouse as "the Disney rodent").

Hitt is addressing journalists and essayists, but we verbal branders face the same challenge--with the added twist that we're channeling (or inventing) a corporate personality that needs to be perceived as authentic and consistent.

The draft copy RepairPal showed me of the home page and main landing pages had predictable first-draft problems. Much of the language was stilted and formal. In striving for brevity, the team had sacrificed warmth, connection, and even essential information. The copy was sprinkled with MBA-isms like "metrics," "benchmarks," and "next steps." You could hear the effort that had gone into writing it. And this was for a website that needed to sound relaxed, confident, and friendly--like a repair pal.

(A note about the name: it had already been chosen and registered by the time I signed on. At my first meeting I mentioned my concerns about conflicts with PayPal--would customers think RepairPal was a subsidiary? Would PayPal sue?--and was told that trademark lawyers had already looked into those issues and given a green light.)

Many of my recommendations had to do with consistency: on the home page, each of the three "action" boxes now has a headline that starts with an imperative verb. Consistency leads to clarity, and clarity builds confidence. I also recommended using "you" and "your" as often as possible: strange as it seems, that direct connection with the user had been missing. I also came up with the home page's main headline, "We take the mystery out of auto repair!" We went through a lot of rounds on that single line. Should it be "mystery", "headache," or "guesswork"? Did we really need the exclamation point? (I said yes.) At one point the line was going to be "Take the despair out of auto repair," which has the cute rhyme and that touch of darkness I personally find appealing. But it was a tad too dark for many other folks.

I did a lot of work on the tagline, too. In the end, David Sturtz chose a line he'd been working on himself: Car Care Confidence. (For several weeks it was Confident Car Care, which I preferred. What do you think?)

Then there were all the brandable elements: What should we call the huge parts-and-service database, the estimating function, the record-storage section? And there were questions about whether certain terms--including car make--were too jargon-y for a general audience. I said most people--yes, even women--knew what make meant. The word went in. We went back and forth on such seemingly trivial points as whether the record-storage section (a nifty and valuable feature of the site) should be called MyCar or My Car. I said the closed-up version looked too artificial. The space went in.

It may seem mind-boggling that this sort of work can occupy six months, on and off, but the RepairPal guys, to their credit, take language very seriously. The site is still in beta, and I'm sure much will change. Still, I'm pleased that I could give RepairPal many of its first public words. Take the site for a test drive (sorry; couldn't resist) and let me know what you think. The really impressive section is the one for which I did no consulting at all: the auto repair encyclopedia. An army of auto experts shared their collective wisdom to create it (and a professional copyeditor helped smooth out the language). It's a beautiful thing.

Read what the press has been saying about RepairPal.

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¹ I discovered "warmify" on Picasa, the photo storage and editing site: it's one of the effects you can apply to your pictures. I've been using the word in other contexts ever since.

May Linkfest

Lots o' links this month, so make yourself comfortable.

Haikuvies: Tell a movie's plot/In seventeen syllables/Spoilers? Sure--why not? (Actually, you get 17 times seven.)

It took about 24 hours for a meme called When Obama Wins to make the leap from Twitter to the whole wide web. Gather round, children, and hear Andrew Crow of Adaptive Path tell the origin story:

I'm never sure about how internet memes start, but this one started with a typo.

Dan was twittering something about Alabama, but wrote "Alambama". He joked that when Barack Obama wins the election, certain states will probably be renamed Alobama, Califobama, Nevama, Massabama, New Yobama. Of course, I thought that was hilarious and started thinking about other things that would change once Obama wins. So, a few of us started twittering silly little things, thinking of it as an inside joke.

Overnight, a few people caught on giving it a life of its own.

Jason Kottke took this and mashed it up to create this really cool microsite.

I think what interests me the most about these is how fast they spread. It's been less than 24 hours and there are already over 500 tweets about it. Certainly taken on a life of it's own.

Which is the perfect segue to my favorite WOW so far: "When Obama wins ... everyone will know the difference between its and it's." (By 111archeravenue.)

I considered saving this for Halloween, but death is always in season at Fatal Utterances, "a glossary of slang, jargon, euphemism, and cant as used by undertakers, criminals, consumer activists, and the ordinary people." Some favorite entries: bier baron (a funeral-parlor owner), Mrs. Z (a corpse), and Stare Number 12 ("the look that passes over a man's face as he regards another man as a meal").

The idea behind Brand Tags is that a brand is whatever people say it is. Go there and give your one-word impressions of brands like Gap, Starbucks, Yahoo, Greenpeace, Whole Foods, and many more. (It's all over Twitter now, but I heard it first from Rowland Hobbs, whose tags I follow on Del.icio.us.)

The Big Word Project is selling words at $1 a letter. "Search for your word and link it to your website. Your website is then the new definition." Started by a couple of graduate students in Northern Ireland.

You probably know about Stuff White People Like, which reportedly is being turned into a book. (What do white people like? Coffee, Asian girls, Ivy League schools--stuff like that.) Now Andrew Hammel, an American in Germany, offers Stuff White Germans Like: #3 Balkan disco music, #5 custom-designed bookshelves, #11 Paul Auster. (Really? Paul Auster?)

Roy Peter Clark is serializing his next book, The Glamour of Grammar, on his Poynter Online blog (Poynter's slogan: "Everything You Need to Be a Better Journalist"). He's inviting readers to make suggestions and correct errors. His goal is to present "not a comprehensive grammar, but an essential grammar: those elements of language that the reader and writer can use today and every day." Even if you groan at the mention of grammar, read this series: it's lively and engaging and wildly informative. (Yes, glamour of grammar. You knew the two words were related, didn't you? Roy explains in his first installment)

Mike Pope on the seven stages of being edited:

3) Anger

I'm starting to get irritated. What the -- ? That's a stupid edit. And so's that one. Ha! That's just wrong! Smartypants editors, think they know everything! Well, let me just set that editor straight ...

And speaking of anger, here's the Baltimore Sun's John McIntyre on "Those Damn Copy Editors," in which he addresses the complaint of "someone named Seth Godin"¹ that a copy editor "totally wrecked" his work:

Unfortunately, Mr. Godin does not supply a single instance of the copy editor's destructiveness, so it is up for discussion whether he is an injured author or a fulminating boor. (The other texts at his blog do not suggest that revision of his prose would be a cultural catastrophe.)

Catching his breath, McIntyre offers some very sensible suggestions for improving relations between writers and copy editors.

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¹ Guru Supremo of hip marketing manifestos and, according to one of McIntyre's commenters, "author of the most popular ebook ever."

How Wowowow.com Got Its Name

What it is: a new website for women over 40. Content includes articles about health, fashion, love, marriage, and politics, as well as "intimate" celebrity interviews. And, naturally, a horoscope.

Who's behind it: five "media live-wire" femmes d'un certain age, according to an article in the Thursday Styles section of the New York Times--former book publisher Joni Evans, veteran gossip columnist Liz Smith, advertising executive Mary Wells, political columnist Peggy Noonan, and TV news reporter Lesley Stahl.

Media live-wires they may be, but cyber-savvy they are wo-wo-woefully not, according to reporter Stephanie Rosenbloom:

Web culture, from the technicalities of uploading content to the verbal nakedness that is blogging, was unfamiliar. Even acquiring a domain name was, as Ms. Smith put it at a gathering of some of the founders the other day, an uphill battle.

“I wanted to call the site AllTheGoodNamesAreTaken.com,” she said. (Actually, she wanted to call it Hot Voodoo, after the Marlene Dietrich song, but the other women shot it down.)

Ms. Stahl suggested adopting a name that incorporated the word “broad,” like broad-minded, but there were objections to that too.

“I went through a period where I really thought ‘After all we have done in our lives and accomplished — to call ourselves broads?’ ” said Ms. Wells, the founder of the advertising and marketing agency Wells Rich Greene.

Somewhere Ms. Evans has a long list of thumbs-down domain names (i.e., HerTube.com). “I remember how innocent we were,” she said. The name they settled on is a play on “Women on the Web.”

“We actually bought out a porn site to get this name,” Ms. Evans said. (Technically, they didn’t buy a porn business, just womenontheweb.com.) Now, “when anyone looks for that porn site, they’re directed to us,” said Ms. Evans, who became chief executive of the site after retiring last year as a senior vice president at the William Morris Agency’s literary department.

One is all for sisters doing it, you know, for themselves, but still. One despairs. One inquires:

1. Did it not occur to these ladies even once to seek the levelheaded counsel of someone with professional naming and domain-acquisition experience? Someone who could, say, mediate the discussion and provide a much-needed reality check?
2. Did anyone consider that the name might be confusing to read and say? (I thought it was pronounced woe-woe-wow until I saw the logo, which looks like Wow O Wow.)
3. Did anyone perform the simple experiment of saying the name aloud? (Consider the poor receptionist, saying "wowowow" 150 times a day.)
4. Did anyone ask, "How does 'Wowowow' advance our brand story? How does it express maturity, media savvy, a different voice? How on earth does it say 'Women on the Web'?"
5. Did anyone raise her hand and say, "Wowowow: this just sounds silly"?
6. About that porn-site redirect: did anyone ask herself and her colleagues, "Could this be a liability?"

And one more thing: a horoscope? Oh. Woe.

The site launches Saturday.

Good News

The New York Times, finally cottoning to the notion that information wants to be free*, has abandoned its pricey TimesSelect program and made all current web content free--including columns by Tom Friedman, David Brooks, and Maureen Dowd--as well as all archived material back to 1987. The change took effect this morning.

If you start noticing more advertising on the site, it's no coincidence.

Now Rupert Murdoch, new owner of the Wall Street Journal, says he's "leaning toward" making WSJ.com free as well. Full online access currently costs $79 a year. Like his counterparts at the Times, Murdoch would expect to make up the difference, and then some, in ad revenue.

* From remarks by Stewart Brand at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984. Brand's full quote: ""On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other." Link.

Unmentionable

Laddie mag Maxim was just auctioned off at a fire-sale price to a private equity group, but its spirit lives on in a new Canadian underwear brand:

Dik.

It's for men. Get it?

The corporate web site shamelessly calls Dik an "ingenious name," and adds that the product represents "the ultimate in sophistication."

As evidenced, naturally enough, by the name. I mean, they could have called it something stupid, like Nuts or Shaft or Ballboy.

The company evidently spent its entire marketing budget on moody black-and-white beefcake photography, leaving approximately 20 cents (Canadian) to split between name development and copywriting. A few examples of the latter:

• dik undergarments is taking an established product and turning it on it’s [sic] head.
• with clever advertising and a playful demeanor, dik perfectly blends ultra-modern with the new sexy. [As opposed to the old sexy, which was boring and serious.]
• make no mistake, dik Undergarments is a high-end men’s underwear line. [Thanks for setting us straight!]

And the slam-dunk tagline:

• go ahead, show a little dik!

Um ... wouldn't that be called a product-design failure?

Not that they expect anyone to read any of this: all the copy is set in lower-case reverse type (white on black).

And talk about upscale--get a load of that sophisticated, discerning Web 2.0 logo.

Via Short Takes.

Best FAQ Ever?

John Fluevog is a Canadian designer of shoes for men and women, but really, he's so much more: “I’m an armchair philosopher, and artist and a style monger, my shoes and messages are quite simply a part of me.” (He's also a comma splicer, but we'll forgive him this once.) Those messages appear on the rubber soles of his fanciful yet comfortable footwear: "To love or hate, the choice is yours," "Your sole will direct your future," "Be perfect." (Click on the hubcap to read more.)

But I really want to write about "About." Fluevog's "About" page reveals a fearless creativity the likes of which is in sadly short supply on corporate websites. Yes, the Frequently Asked Questions include the predictable "Where can I find a Fluevog store near me?" and "Can your shoes be resoled?" but they also feature the following:

• What is the capital of Uruguay?
• Are John Fluevog Angels really Satan resistant?
• Do you have special Fluevog elves that do shoe repairs?
• Who played vibes with Benny Goodman's band between 1936 and 1940?

You want to know, don't you? So read the answers.

Pictured: The Lady Ophelia, "a sensible yet edgy slip on pump with the classic 3" Signature Rococo heel and oblique toe shape." (US$269)

What I've Been Up To

I've been working on a long-overdue update of my web site. In the meantime, for those of you who care, here are some of the projects I've recently completed:

• All new content for the Children's Fairyland web site. Fairyland is that rare thing: a relevant anachronism. It opened in 1950 on the shores of Oakland's Lake Merritt as a storybook theme park for young children, and for 57 years has successfully resisted the lure of thrill rides, arcade games, and corporate sponsorship. (Walt Disney visited the park the year it opened and copied many of its features when he created Disneyland.) At Fairyland, admission is only $6 and everything is kid-scale and kid-friendly. It has no roller coasters, but it does have a little library hut and the oldest continuously operating puppet theater in the United States. It has a children's theater program, a pair of rabbits, a llama, and an elderly pony. And it has lots of stuff that adults find corny and little kids absolutely adore--like Magic Keys that operate talking Storybook Boxes and a big elf statue that blows bubbles. Little kids love those bubbles. Fairyland is a wonderful place to visit, but its web site wasn't. It was awkwardly written and confusing to navigate, and it didn't convey the spirit of the place. So I set about creating a new voice, stories, and site architecture. I interviewed more than a dozen people involved with Fairyland, from 79-year-old puppetmaster Lewis Mahlmann, who's worked with the park for 40 years, to 9-year-old Anthony Sung, who played a flying monkey in Fairyland's 2005 production of "The Wizard of Oz." And I spent lots and lots of time with C.J. Hirschfield, Fairyland's dedicated and inspirational executive director. Then I persuaded my friend Susan Bercu, a gifted designer and illustrator, to create templates for the site design. Susan used to teach preschool; she really got the spirit of Fairyland. But I'm biased. See for yourself.
• A new name for a Silicon Valley restart-up (formerly Connex Technology): BrightScale. The company makes the chip arrays that make high-definition TV look good across a range of international standards. The new name plays on the optical term gray scale, a black-to-white spectrum. This was my third naming project with CEO Dave Corbin--he gets around--and as usual, he was a dream client: clear, attentive, and decisive. The BrightScale.com URL was taken but not developed; I helped negotiate a smooth domain transfer. My deep gratitude to genius graphic designer Mark Landkamer, who brought the identity and web site to life.
• Name development for TRIA, the first clinically proven laser hair-removal device for home use. Trademarked as both a medical device and a beauty product, the name had to suggest skin beauty, femininity, strength, freedom, modernity, elegance, and light. The coined word TRIA (pronunced TREE-ah) combines a crisp, efficient-sounding consonant blend with an open, feminine suffix; the word suggests "trim" and "ray" and also hints at the three-point contact area of the device. I also consulted on the tagline, "The Enlightened Solution," and on the URL, TriaBeauty.com.
• Web content for Central Station, a multifaceted new real estate development on the site of a historic West Oakland railroad terminal. My client was Holliday Development, which has worked for years with community and government groups to move the development forward. I wrote all content, including descriptions of projects being developed by companies other than Holliday. Very nice site design by LStudio.
• Name development for New Routes to Community Health, a nonprofit venture that creates multimedia programs to encourage new U.S. immigrants to improve their health status. Among other constraints, the new name couldn't use the words "immigrant," "assimilation," or "new American." I worked with a client team spread across three time zones and presented the names via conference call. The chosen name connects strongly to the team's previous successful project, Sound Partners for Community Health, while also suggesting the immigrant journey and--through homophonic association--the "new roots" immigrants are putting down in their adopted homeland.

More news after it happens.

Writing Matters: Part 1

I'm working on a large, complex web project that--as seems to be the rule--is driven by "the visual experience." Before I joined the project, a huge amount of work had already been generated: spreadsheets, wireframes, design comps. Very little had been said or written about the writing, which nevertheless is a large piece of the puzzle. (Almost the entire existing website must be rewritten.) Instead, I hear repeatedly that "we don't want a lot of words," "we'll design it first and just flow the copy in later," and "we want more charts and graphs, less writing!" I also hear the imagery and design called "the creative"--creative here is a standalone noun--while the writing is called "the text."

The audience for the site? Without violating any confidences, I'll simply say it's highly educated and hungry for information.

This, as the King of Siam said, is a puzzlement.

Now, I tend to harbor the predictable biases on this subject, so I was delighted to stumble upon a well-reasoned defense of web writing written by a self-described "pixel person," San Francisco-based designer Derek Powazek, on the extremely worthwhile blog A List Apart ("for people who make websites"). To my surprise and delight, Derek recommends that designers learn to write. "When it comes to experience on the web," he says, "there’s no better way to create it than to write, and write well." Well, golly!

Derek continues:

Let’s look at everybody’s favorite example of Doing it Right: Flickr. Ask a bunch of people what they think of their experience at Flickr and they’ll use words like “fun” and “friendly” to describe it.

Why? There’s nothing uniquely fun about black text on a white background. There’s nothing friendly about uploading and tagging, no matter how many whiz-bang AJAX tricks you use. Sure, the photographic content lends itself to a personal experience. But nobody ever talked about how much fun Ofoto was. And the community-oriented social networking features lend themselves to an emotional experience, but I think there’s something more going on here.

I say: It’s the writing. The friendliness comes from good old fashioned text. When you visit the site, it welcomes you with a random language. Hola! Salut! Shalom! When you log in, the button says “Get in there” instead of “Submit.” When you upload a photo, join a group, add a contact…all of the associated text is open, encouraging, happy, and excited. And it has a significant impact on the overall user experience.

"Happy, excited" writing can't entirely overcome poor site architecture and ugly design. But a website doesn't stand a chance of reaching its goals without strong writing. Unfortunately, people who create websites often forget that while websites are indeed experiential, corporate websites are rarely if ever "visual experiences," nor should they be. As Derek Powazek makes clear, they are informational experiences, and the lingua franca of information is still, well, lingua: language.

People who design corporate websites often forget that people who use websites are readers. They must read. Many of them even like to read. So let's give them something to reassure them of our intelligence (and our respect for theirs). Let's give them something that expresses our appreciation for their business. Let's give them great writing.

More on the importance of writing tomorrow.

Search Me

Jakob Nielsen, who has been called the king, guru, pope, and czar of web usability, as well as "the smartest person on the web," has an excellent article on "findability"--writing for search engine optimization (SEO)--in his August 28 Alertbox column. His pithy summary:

Familiar words spring to mind when users create their search queries. If your writing favors made-up terms over legacy words, users won't find your site.

Nielsen uses one of my favorite quotations to make his point, Winston Churchill's "Short words are best, and the old words when short are best of all." Even better than short words, says Nielsen, are precise and familiar words--the words real people are likely to use when they search.

More Nielsen tips:

• Supplement made-up words with known words--words your customers use in everyday business practice.
• Play down marketese and internal vocabulary. "Call a spade a spade, not a digging implement. Certainly not an excavation solution."
• Supplement brand names with generic terms. Don't abandon the 95% of prospects who are searching for the problem and don't yet know the name of your solution.
• Avoid politically correct terminology--say "blind" or "limited vision" instead of "visually challenged."

Here's my own two cents:

• Don't compromise the integrity of your web content by including intentionally misspelled terms because you expect some users will misspell their search terms. It's simply not worth the damage to your credibility and professional image.
• Writing clear, simple, "findable" prose is a lot tougher than concocting flowery piffle or jargon soup. To cite another great writer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Easy reading is damn hard writing." Do your SEO homework, and then hire an experienced web writer who knows how to seed text with search terms so the result seems natural and graceful.

Getting It Wrong about Web Writing

I recently turned down a project because the client--an otherwise smart, experienced businessperson with a terrific idea for a start-up--just didn't get it about writing for the web.

The client had in mind a web site of at least 100 information-rich pages--probably 30,000 to 50,000 words--with lots of internal links and a clear structure that would allow average Joes and Janes to make sense of important content. The client had a decent business plan and exhibited a good understanding of the roles of publicity, search-engine optimization, and design.

I've written content for similarly complex, text-heavy sites, and I know how much work they involve. I based my estimate on that experience and on the special requirements of the new site. It was a very reasonable estimate. Trust me.

The client's response? "But...but...I'm just a start-up! I can't afford to pay this!" And then the client did something that would have astonished me if I weren't beyond astonishment in such matters: the client advertised on Craigslist for a writer or writers to write the content for free. "I know it'll be bad," the client told me, ever so matter-of-factly. "But then maybe I can pay you by the hour to fix it up."

Maybe? I don't think so.

What's sad about my little story is how unexceptional it is. Writing--a k a "content"--is all too often the poor stepchild of web site development, an ill-conceived, underbudgeted line item that inevitably demands three or four times as much time and labor as the client originally imagined.

You don't have to take my word for it. According to this survey by British-based Next Communications, only 10 percent of website projects give top priority to writing, while 75 percent put design in first place. Yet "when asked what caused website launches to be delayed, 55% cited ‘content not ready’ or ‘content not suited to web pages’ as key reasons." (I've added the boldface for emphasis.)

In summing up, Next Communications director Barry Monk made what I'd usually flag as a language-usage error: "It’s easy to underestimate the enormity of the content task for a new website and assume it can simply be ported over from an old site." If Monk meant "huge size and scope," he should have said "enormousness." But perhaps he really did mean "the quality of passing all moral bounds; excessive wickedness or outrageousness"--the definition of "enormity."

Hat tip to Matthew Stibbe at Bad Language, who cites the study and adds his own "web manifesto," which includes:

• Put writing first. "Plan, budget, and resource writing for the site as if it were the most important thing, not a bolt-on, go-faster, last minute extra."
• Writing is a specialized skill. "You don't get a plumber to do your wiring so why get a design firm or a marcomms agency to write?"
• Bad writing is expensive. "If your customers can't find what they are looking for, can't understand it when they do find it, or are so confused or bored they don't read it, you lose."

Read Matthew's entire post for more insights.